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The King’s English
H.W. Fowler
| The plan for the second edition of the classic reference work The King’s English was dictated by the following considerations: (1) to pass by all rules, of whatever absolute importance, that are shown by observation to be seldom or never broken; and (2) to illustrate by living examples, with the name of a reputable authority attached to each, all blunders that observation shows to be common. |
Contents
| SECOND EDITION
OXFORD: CLARENDON PRESS, 1908 |
- No levell’d malice
- Infects one comma in the course I hold.
- Timon of Athens, I. i. 48.
PART I
Chapter I. Vocabulary
- General Principles
- Familiar and far-fetched words
- Concrete and abstract expression
- Circumlocution
- Short and long words
- Saxon and Romance words
- Requirements of different styles
- Malaprops
- Neologisms
- Americanisms
- Foreign words
- Formation
- Slang
- Individual
- Mutual
- Unique
- Aggravate
Chapter II. Syntax
- Case
- Number
- Comparatives and superlatives
- Relatives
- Defining and non-defining relative clauses
- That and who or which
- And who, and which
- Case of the relative
- Miscellaneous uses of the relative
- It … that
- Participle and gerund
- Participles
- The gerund
- Distinguishing the gerund
- Omission of the gerund subject
- Choice between gerund and infinitive
- Shall and will
- The pure system
- The coloured-future system
- The plain-future system
- Second-person questions
- Examples of principal sentences
- Substantival clauses
- Conditional clauses
- Indefinite clauses
- Examples of subordinate clauses
- Perfect infinitive
- Conditionals
- Doubt that
- Prepositions
- General difficulties
- General principles
- The spot plague
- Over-stopping
- Under-stopping
- Grammar and punctuation
- Substantival clauses
- Subject, &c., and verb
- Adjectival clauses
- Adverbial clauses
- Parenthesis
- Misplaced commas
- Enumeration
- Comma between independent sentences
- Semicolon with subordinate members
- Exclamations and statements
- Exclamations and questions
- Internal question and exclamation marks
- Unaccountable commas
- The colon
- Miscellaneous
- Dashes
- Hyphens
- Quotation marks
- Jingles
- Alliteration
- Repeated prepositions
- Sequence of relatives
- Sequence of that, &c.
- Metrical prose
- Sentence accent
- Causal as clauses
- Wens and hypertrophied members
- Careless repetition
- Common misquotations
- Uncommon misquotations of well-known passages
- Misquotation of less familiar passages
- Misapplied and misunderstood quotations and phrases
- Allusion
- Incorrect allusion
- Dovetailed and adapted quotations and phrases
- Trite quotation
- Latin abbreviations, &c.
- Unequal yokefellows and defective double harness
- Common parts
- The wrong turning
- Ellipse in subordinate clauses
- Some illegitimate infinitives
- Split infinitives
- Compound passives
- Confusion with negatives
- Omission of as
- Other liberties taken with as
- Brachylogy
- Between two stools
- The impersonal one
- Between … or
- A placed between the adjective and its noun
- Do as substitute verb
- Fresh starts
- Vulgarisms and colloquialisms
Chapter III. Airs and Graces
Chapter IV. Punctuation
PART II
Some less important chapters had been designed on Euphony, Ambiguity, Negligence, and other points. But as the book would with them have run to too great length, some of the examples have been simply grouped here in independent sections, with what seemed the minimum of comment.